A few weeks ago, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 on a spare [secondary] hard drive. Installation went normal, everything installed properly and I experienced no problems. I enabled the nVidia drivers and rebooted, only to find that something had caused the shutdown to hang. I gave it a few minutes and eventually hit the switch and powered it back on, this time finding that I was getting no video display of any sort (no nvidia splash screen, no BIOS post, no nothing) until I was fully booted into Windows (which I had set as my default boot location).
I managed to get back into my Ubuntu drive and updated everything hoping that would fix it. After the updates, I managed to localize my display problem to something that was occurring during shutdown in Linux (it would hang like it did the first time, and then after I was forced to power it off I would get no display after that until I loaded into Windows). Rebooting Windows didn’t cause any problems, any time I did that I could see everything normally.
So, for the past few days I’ve simply not been booting into Linux until I could figure out what the problem was. I decided to format the Linux drive and start over, it seemed to me like something was corrupt within the installation. I formatted my drive, shutdown my PC, and unplugged that secondary drive for a minute to boot into Windows without it attached. Upon booting my PC back up, I found that my display had disappeared again — and it seems like unplugging the hard drive (or formatting it) caused it to happen.
I’m not quite sure what to make of all this. I’ve never had something like this happen before, nor have I ever heard of something like this happening. I have an nVidia 6800 Ultra and an Epox 9-NPA mobo.